Book excerpt: Yoost and Crawford's Fundamentals of Nursing is back for a second-edition encore! The text that made its name by focusing on simple language and active learning continues its focus on helping you truly understand, apply, and retain important nursing information and concepts. Using a warm and conversational style, this new second edition guides you towards a basic understanding of the nursing profession and then logically progresses through the nursing process and into the safe and systematic methods of applying care. Each chapter features realistic and complex case studies and critical thinking exercises woven throughout the content to help you continually apply what you've learned to actual patient care. A conceptual care mapping approach — created by Yoost and Crawford themselves — further your ability to make clinical judgments and synthesize knowledge as you develop plans of care after analyzing and clustering related patient assessment data. All of this paired with a wealth of student-friendly learning features and clinically-focused content offers up a fundamentally different — and effective — way for you to easily master the fundamentals of nursing. - UNIQUE! Warm, friendly writing style slows down the pace of information to give readers time to critically think and master all fundamental concepts and skills. - UNIQUE! Building block approach groups topics and concepts together thematically, in the order needed for readers to build their knowledge. - UNIQUE! Objective-driven approach presents clearly defined, numbered objectives that coordinate with all content and then wrap up with Objective Summaries. - UNIQUE! Active learning activities are incorporated throughout every chapter to help readers learn to apply chapter content to broader nursing concepts and realistic patient scenarios. - UNIQUE! Conceptual care mapping is taught and used throughout the text in conjunction with the Conceptual Care Map Creator. - UNIQUE! Emphasis on QSEN reinforces the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses competencies, including: patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, safety, and informatics. - Special feature boxes cover the areas of: diversity consideration, evidence-based practice, informatics, patient education, healthy literacy, health assessment questions, interprofessional collaboration and delegation, ethical and legal practice, home care considerations, safe practice alerts, QSEN, critical thinking exercises, and nursing care guidelines. - NEW! Interprofessional collaboration and delegation content appears throughout the text along with new IPE activities that are integrated into the Evolve resources. - NEW & UNIQUE! Review and exam questions tied to learning objectives use a building-block style approach that starts at lower Bloom's taxonomy levels in early chapters and builds to more complex levels as readers acquire more knowledge. - NEW! Emphasis on assignment and delegation covers the differences between them and how and when they're appropriate for an RN. - NEW! Content on complementary therapies has been integrated throughout the text to reflect the changes to the NCLEX exam. - NEW! Additional information has been added in the areas of HCAHPS, Health Literacy, Patient Education, Drugs of Abuse, Zika, Ebola, and more.